US Patent 10977573 Distantly supervised wrapper induction for semi-structured documents

Systems and methods provide distantly supervised wrapper induction for semi-structured documents, including automatically generating and annotating training documents for the wrapper. Training of the wrapper may occur in two phases using the training documents. An example method includes identifying a training set of semi-structured web pages having a subject entity that exists in a knowledge base and, for each training page, identifying target objects, identifying predicates in the knowledge base that connect the subject entity to a target objects identified in the training page, and annotating the training page. Annotating a training page includes generating a feature set for a mention of the target object, generating predicate-target object pairs for the mention, and labeling each predicate-target object pair with a corresponding example type and weight. The annotated training pages are used to train the wrapper to extract new subject entities and new facts from the set of semi-structured web pages.